The AI game is played in the Super Bowl
The struggle between companies to position themselves in the competitive artificial intelligence market is evident in the television event of the year: a quarter of the advertisements were of a technological nature.
BarcelonaIf anyone still doubted that artificial intelligence is the new battleground of technocapitalism, Super Bowl LX confirmed it. A quarter of the sixty-six commercials aired during last Sunday's game featured AI. At eight million dollars per 30 seconds, digital companies turned the most-watched TV broadcast in the US into a parallel competition to sell us a future that's much brighter on screen than in reality.
Anthropic vs. OpenAI: advertising criticizing advertising
The star matchup of the night wasn't the football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots – decided in the third quarter 29-13 – but rather the game between two AI companies. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees who left due to disagreements over security and ethics, made its Super Bowl debut with four commercials for its chatbot Claude titled " Betrayal", Deception", Disloyaltyand " Rape"
In each ad, a person asks a personal question to an AI chatbot—how to communicate better with their mother, how to get a six-pack, how to make a business successful—and receives an initially helpful response that suddenly devolves into a blatant advertisement. The chatbot-therapist ends up selling a dating website for mature women; the personal trainer, insoles to make you look taller; the business advisor, a quick loan "because empowered women need cash." The final tagline: "Ads are reaching AI. But not Claude."
A dig at OpenAI. Sam Altman's company announced last month that it would begin inserting ads into ChatGPT's responses for users of the free versions: if you don't pay, your conversations with the AI will be accompanied by ads. Anthropic attacked on the grounds of trust.
Altman responded on X with a tweet calling Claude's ads "funny" but "clearly dishonest," accusing Anthropic of selling an expensive product to the rich and arguing that advertising was the only way to "make AI accessible to billions of people who can't afford a subscription."
OpenAI's Super Bowl ad—a 60-second spot titled " You too can build things" – They opted for the opposite strategy: no cynicism, all humanism. Children's hands drawing, notebooks, code, robots, and finally, the new Codex programming assistant. Human creativity amplified by technology. But in the end, they could have added: "And with ads, if you don't pay."
Anthropic's move has been compared to the legendary ad " 1984" Apple versus IBM, and some are already predicting that Anthropic will be worth more than OpenAI within a year. But subsequent surveys temper the enthusiasm: Anthropic's ads didn't win over the general audience. Super Bowl viewers prefer dogs to jokes about business models.
Ring: A lost dog in a dystopia
If we're talking about dogs, it's because Ring, which sells video doorbells and surveillance cameras, issued " an advertisement that aimed to evoke emotion", but it has ended up generating alarm. The issue was..." Search Party"(Search Brigade), the feature used by Ring cameras throughout an entire neighborhood to find lost pets using AI recognition. A child is looking for his dog, the cameras activate, the AI detects the animal, and the family is reunited. Music, tears, happy ending.
The problem is that behind the little dog's story lies a massive video surveillance network activated by default—the feature must be manually deactivated—a history of collaboration with law enforcement, and the possibility that what is used today to find a dog could be used tomorrow to track people. Add to that the fact that Ring is an Amazon subsidiary, and you have the perfect recipe for digital paranoia.
" Even more technology
Google Gemini announced with a mother and her son redecorating their new house. Amazon featured Chris Hemsworth fighting a " Alexa+ who was trying to kill him". Goal promoted its Oakley AI-powered glasses"Salesforce" signed the YouTuber MrBeast to sell the Slackbot autonomous agent. Genspark He brought back the Matthew Broderick from a 1986 film to convince us that their AI would allow us to skip work.
When technology is both the product... and the problem
The most curious thing about the night was AI.com, the platform of Kris Marszalek, co-founder of Crypto.com, who paid €65 million for the domain and several million more to advertise simply by asking viewers to reserve his account. Without any explanation of what it actually does, only... two balls of light colliding in space" and a message: "General AI is coming. Reserve your user account now." The surge of traffic after the ad aired crashed the website.
Squarespace opted for the dramatic route: Emma Stone stars in " Unavailable", a black and white spot Shot on 35mm film, the commercial shows the actress crying because the domain emmastone.com was already taken.
Accounting software TurboTax turned to Adrien Brody. The spot " The ExpertThe video showed the actor preparing intensely to play a tax advisor, repeating phrases with different accents and crying to "connect with the pain of taxes." The message: filing your taxes no longer has to be dramatic because TurboTax handles everything for you.
There were also technical glitches. In addition to the aforementioned AI.com issue, Salesforce launched a contest with a million-dollar prize that suffered email overload. The company owner later boasted that 53 million people had visited the website, turning a technical failure into a marketing victory. And let's not forget Coinbase, which Once again, he did not explain what he does for a living."
The numbers of the big circusThe broadcast averaged 124.9 million viewers, the second-highest audience in history, with a record peak of 137.8 million. Each 30-second ad cost eight million dollars, with some slots exceeding 10 million. AI companies spent twice as much on advertising as cryptocurrencies did in 2022. We all know how that party ended.
This madness makes sense. According to Kantar, the 2024 Super Bowl ads generated $8.60 for every dollar spent, 20 times more effective than conventional TV ads. The difference isn't just the size of the audience, but all the media hype surrounding these campaigns. You pay eight million for half a minute of airtime, but what you're really buying is that everyone will be talking about it for weeks.
Apple and Bad Bunny: the controversy doesn't need ads
Apple did not air any ads during the game. For the fourth consecutive year, Apple Music sponsored the halftime show", starring Bad Bunny with Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. The first solo performance by a Latin artist, almost entirely in Spanish, sparked outrage among Republicans – including Trump – and a 470% increase in the artist's streams... on Spotify.